Business users need to see information related to what they are working on at the time. What hinders information workers today is the often-complicated process of locating the right information needed to complete their work. Information is stored at multiple locations and in varying formats. In spite of the promise of automation, application integration is inadequate or nonexistent for small to midsize companies, and line-of-business (LOB) applications do not supply all the information needs of the worker.
Striving to remain effective, workers typically seek out and employ methods that are cumbersome in order to compare, manage, produce, and track information in a constant flow of documents. For example, oftentimes, personnel are required to rely on paper copies and handwritten notes, tracking lists to patch the data flow in their processes. The worker must search for information using one application to find one piece of information in one document, write it on paper, then switch to another application or source, find another piece of information, and then compare the two.
Conventional systems are limited because of the lack of correlation and lack of an information model describing the relationships between the data. Today's application display surfaces govern the layout, interaction, and behavior of information that is available to a user. Information is stored in association with independent applications where each application manages and describes the relationship of the data and how that information behaves. However, there is little or no correlation of data between applications and, when there is correlation, it is usually at the document level such as for a purchase order, e-mail message, or word document. This ubiquitous need to move information from one context to another throughout the workday places a cognitive burden on the worker, frequently causes the inefficient duplication of effort, and introduces unwanted errors such as associated with transcribing and copying.